Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (also known as “Recovery”) is an international program to locate, preserve, and disseminate the Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form (including texts from the colonial period to 1960). It is housed at the University of Houston and was founded in 1991. Its holdings include thousands of original books, manuscripts, archival items, and ephemera; a microfilm collection of approximately 1,400 historical newspapers; hundreds of thousands of microfilmed and digitized items; a vast collection of photographs; an extensive authority list; and personal papers. In addition, Recovery has published or reprinted more than 40 historical books, two anthologies, and nine volumes of research articles.
Recovery is the premier center for research on US Latina/o documentary history. As such, we find it necessary to actively engage the digital humanities. Although there are many digital humanities research centers that are dedicated to Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian studies, there are none that focus primarily on US Latina/o studies. With the help of grant funds from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we have initiated our mission to create the first US Latina/o digital humanities research center. This center will serve as a venue with a postcolonial emphasis that will allow projects on the US Latina/o written legacy that has been lost, absent, repressed, or underrepresented in colonial structures of power. Our goal is to set up a place where scholars and students from throughout the United States and the rest of the world can receive support and training to access and participate in digital humanities in US Latina/o Studies. The center will also establish opportunities and facilities for digital publication of Latina/o-based projects and scholarship, including data curation, visualization, spatial analysis, metadata creation, digitization, workshops, classes, and invited lectures in order to further opportunities for digital scholarship and publication in the humanities in general.
We look forward to collaborating with scholars and students of US Latina/o studies and the US Southwest studies.
Please follow us on Twitter at @AppRecovery! We use the hashtag #usLdh to tweet about US Latina/o Digital Humanities and #southwesternDH to tweet about Digital Humanities related to the US Southwest.
Visit our blog at: https://recoveryprojectappblog.wordpress.com/
